A big highlight in my social media journey comes in the form of galvanizing my D2C company around the value of LinkedIn for our business and our employees. When I started LinkedIn was an underutilized landscape for the business with no formal strategy other than thought leadership posts for the CEO. With the help of Advocacy by Sprout Social, our internal communications strategist to help get buy in from the community, and the work of our PR director fueling a wealth of amazing stories around the brand, we launched our employee advocacy program to great success. Instead of only sharing marketing-focused content about our products and company, we are able to support the program with a diverse offering of third-party features including corporate social responsibilty stories, business highlights created by partners, vendors, and press, and non-corporate content created by other teams within the company.

We were able to educate all levels of employees on the value of personal branding, offering not only a pool of content for them to share, but the ability to create strong engagement opportunities with brand page and the greater LinkedIn community at large. A little more than a year into the program, we have increased our following by 65% on the platform and more than doubled our impressions, engagements, and link clicks, all while retaining a 6.3% ER. In addition to this amazing growth for the brand page, our employee population has experienced positive metrics on their personal pages, resulting in increased participation in the program, opportunities for thought leadership, and overall morale boost companywide. LinkedIn is NOT only for B2B businesses!